Recommendation 52

What the Royal Commission said

The Royal Commission recommended that:

1. Safer Care Victoria (SCV) create a mental health improvement unit by 1 January 2022.
2. the new unit focuses on:
   • reducing restrictive interventions towards the goal of elimination in 10 years
   • reducing compulsory treatment
   • preventing gender-based violence
   • preventing suicides in mental healthcare settings.
3. the Office of the Chief Mental Health Nurse moves from the Department of Health to SCV. It will continue work on key quality improvement priorities.

What are the opportunities?

SCV is Victoria's lead quality and safety agency tasked with improving quality and safety in Victorian health services.

Reform provides the opportunity to work with mental health and wellbeing service providers to ensure care is safe, connected, appropriate and effective.

What are we doing?

Victoria's Chief Mental Health Nurse and her team moved to SCV in July 2021 and established the Mental Health Improvement Program (MHIP).

The MHIP works with mental health and wellbeing services to:

• provide system leadership on quality and improvement
• provide professional, clinical and practice leadership
• promote awareness and understanding of high quality service delivery
• co design quality and safety improvement programs with people with lived experience
• issue practice guidelines and frameworks.

The MHIP works in collaboration with consumers, carers, family members and clinicians, alongside the Department of Health, the Chief Psychiatrist, the Mental Health and Wellbeing Commission and other stakeholders as part of the new quality and safety architecture for mental health and wellbeing service delivery in Victoria.

The MHIP also focuses on:

• reducing the use of seclusion and restraint in mental health and wellbeing service delivery, with the goal of elimination in 10 years (recommendation 54)
• reducing compulsory treatment (recommendation 55.4)
• improving sexual safety in mental health inpatient units
• implementing the Zero Suicide Framework in healthcare settings.